


Spiritually, This Is An Autobiography*

by Mottled_System



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:02:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27717206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mottled_System/pseuds/Mottled_System
Summary: Trigger Warnings: past trauma, self harm, existentialism, drug use, prescription drugs, pontification about death, death, graphic depictions of violence/gore, body horror, dysmorphia, dysphoria, mental illness, etc.*But it's not actually about me.I'm a twenty-year old, mentally ill and emotionally inept outcast, rotting in place, alone save for my delusions. Or ghosts, maybe. It's sort of hard to trust things people tell you when what they tell you isn't possible and you're literally also already delusional. It's all very existential.





	Spiritually, This Is An Autobiography*

My quiet bursts of pencil on paper are brief and harsh, as always, giving all of my art a jagged and near violent aura to them. I move my head and the notebook nearly as freely as I move the pencil, the entirety of my usually fleeting attention poured wholeheartedly into the drawing. I rarely erase anything that isn’t downright offensive to look at; I find my drawings turn out much better when I breathe life into what it wants to be rather than what I want it to be. If I’m really dead set on what I had intended to draw, and what I make is truly so different from it, I’ll just start over. And I never clean up the drawings anymore- I used to erase the pencil, trace over its remnants with ink, sometimes color it in, but for years the harsh and sketch-like vibes have ruled over my artwork.

Everything about me, everything I make, is jagged and half finished. I’ve accepted it; it’s my aesthetic, I suppose. Just a reluctant collection of the love children of my desperate need to create, the strange and garbled philosophy that my trauma carved into me, and exactly as much time as my ADHD will let and make me pour into something.

ADHD. PTSD. BPD. OCD. So many acronyms, so many expectations, so many implications, so many worries. I ignore them all. I ignore the look my aunt gives me when she sees me taking my Xanax, my Zoloft, my Seroquel, my BuSpar, all the other pills that signify how crazy I am. That’s part of my aesthetic, now, too. A pilled-up freak.

Whatever. The only ways I’m different from before I was medicated- before I was diagnosed- before I was in therapy- are ways that I am better, happier, healthier.

I stop suddenly and look down at what I’ve drawn, just a lanky alt boy around my age in loose clothing, smoking a cigarette, looking about as unapproachable as every other guy I enjoy looking at. He has gauges (like me~) and facial piercings, tattoos, and childish, mismatched socks. His hair is choppy and unkempt. The lines that make up the features of his face bleed into one another, and his eyes are uneven, perhaps to the point of not really looking real. His teeth are crooked.

I decide I like the drawing and walk into my room, tearing the page out from my notebook and fishing out a few push pins, finding a spot on the wall that’s big enough for him.

My walls are covered in sketches- mostly of girls, because girls are pretty, and I like drawing nude drawings but haven’t really figured out how to draw dicks that don’t look really, really dumb. So, my walls are covered in lots of naked girls.

My aunt doesn’t come in here very often. There’s one really big painting nailed above my bed, blocking a good portion of the window behind it, depicting an unapologetically nude woman in neon watercolor. I used to call her Aphrodite, but I’ve taken to calling her garlic, because she keeps my aunt away.

Besides, ‘garlic’ fits my aesthetic a lot more than ‘Aphrodite’, anyway. No offense to her.

I shouldn’t be so hard on my aunt. She feeds and houses me for nothing in return. But she’s also, you know, kind of a bitch. I go back and forth on whether or not I’m justified or a spoiled, whiny brat.

I mean, it’s probably both, but whatever.

I plop onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling. It’s just plain and white and boring. My dad’s old house had those god awful popcorn ceilings; maybe a bad look, sure, but it was easier to stare at and lose myself in the mere sight of it, get lost in the nooks and peaks and shadows and lines. Here, all I could do was stare at the sparse remnants of a dead spider and let my eyes fool me into thinking it's moving even though it’s been there for months and you’d think my brain would learn by now, idiot.

I have a job. That’s surprising, I know, but I’ve had a few. I was fifteen when I got the first one; I’d been a ‘proud’ crew member at Del Taco, a restaurant I had previously refused to eat at merely because I already liked Taco Bell, but after I started working there I found out that actually Del Taco was better, but Dad hated it so after I left I could never eat it again- I left because he was having health issues and I wanted to be around him more- and then he died and now I can’t eat it or think about it (or eat Taco Bell because it makes me think about Del Taco and therefore Dad) and so that sucks. Their fries are good.

I’d taken a long break after that; freshly an orphan, I’d been shipped off to live with my mother’s sister, a strange and pompous woman I’d never known very well who seemed entirely too fond of me. She had started off okay, just a bit clingy, a bit fretful- but I couldn’t blame her. I was an emotionally unstable orphan, and both of my parents had killed themselves after a long and arduous battle with some illness or another. And, of course, I  _ was _ \- am- suicidal. So it wasn’t exactly a wasted fear.

I got my second job on my nineteenth birthday, this time working at Subway. That only lasted two months; at first, I loved it, because I closed and I was usually alone and, sure, dinner rush often led to me having a panic attack in the dirty southwestern-inspired bathroom built in the 70s, but that wasn’t too much more often than I had them at home, anyway. It was better than high school- which I dropped out of after Dad died and the panic attacks started- where I was having three or four a day. Anyway, as time went by, the store got dirtier and dirtier (not that it had been pristine beforehand) and my coworkers kept leaving more and more work on my shoulders and I, an easily overwhelmed basket case, could not keep up. I’d left about three weeks before it was closed down, but not before a coworker ‘borrowed’ and then did not pay back my last two paychecks.

Nineteen year olds are dumb.

Anyway. My third job was at a rehab facility; like a nursing home, but also for younger sick people, people recovering from surgery and stuff. I’d started in housekeeping, but going into residents’ rooms and, Gods forbid, being spoken to by them proved too much for me, so my boss had moved me into laundry. That had been a really good, easy gig; it was easy to keep the storage rooms stocked, giving me ample amounts of spare time, and since I worked nights I was basically free to fuck off… Until one of the custodians or whatever snitched on me. It wasn’t like I was slacking; there was legitimately nothing to do. I’d quit not long after, having no clue what I was meant to do instead of taking extra breaks and being overwhelmed by the fear of being yelled at by my boss. Towards the end, the panic attacks had resumed.

Another long break; now, at the Ripe Old Age of twenty (and a half; I’d stopped caring about that until twenty because twenty-one meant I could legally buy booze and I was half-seriously planning on becoming a semi-functioning alcoholic), I work in another, different rehab facility, taking the temperatures of people as they come in the building and writing down their names and whether or not they’ve have any sign of illness. Twelve dollars an hour full time to sit on my ass and take people’s temperatures; not a bad gig. Instead of rotting at home, I was rotting at work, getting paid for it.

There’s a knock at my door. I groan out a reluctant permittance, and my aunt slinks into the doorway of my bedroom, looking like an easily offended cat. Her big, round, blue eyes, like giant and shimmering orbs, dart over my cluttered room and its busy, uncoordinated walls with a sheepish disapproval. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I say.

“When do you work?”

“Eleven,” I say, glancing at the clock on my closet door. It’s two-thirty; if I worked the afternoon shift, I’d have left already. “Why?”

“We should get dinner,” she says.

She wants to go to a restaurant. My jaw clenches; we have argued about this countless times since quarantine began. I know she’s going to drag me out despite the pandemic, despite my job, and I guess it’s all the same; we live together, and even if she went out alone and got it, I’d get it, too.

The guilt lingers. I work in a rehab center full of high risk people. I look at my wall, my eyes settling on a small woman sitting on the ground, hugging her emaciated legs, an air of despair around her. “I’m not hungry,” I say. I’m also guilty about that, because it’s true, and I won’t eat if I don’t eat with my aunt, and I won’t go out, and it won’t make a difference that I won’t, and I’ll get thinner and thinner and my aunt will get more and more scared and maybe I’ll have to go back into inpatient and-

“Are you sure? I could bring something back for you, just in case.”

Sweet, merciful Gods. “Sure. Something plain.”

“Alright. Are you going to be okay alone?”

“Yeah. Be safe.”

“Of course. Love you, sweetie.”

“Love you, too.”

She leaves and closes my door, and I listen intently as she slowly pulls on her jacket, steps into her shoes. My walls might as well be paper mache. I hear the soft jangling of her minimalistic key chain, hear the jarring sound of the heavy, aged deadbolt, hear the door open and close and hear the deadbolt again.

The guilt returns. I should have stopped her.

I couldn’t.

But I should have.

What was I supposed to do, tackle her?

The thoughts continue as I argue with myself.

Suddenly, there is a man in my room, which is a thing that happens sometimes, I guess. I mean. Not specifically a man, being specifically in my room, but, you know. People suddenly being there. For me.

I see things. I’ve never been good at disclosing that. It’s always clunky and much more awkward than it has to be, and knowing Normal People, it is always going to be very awkward, anyway.

They mean well, usually, and that usually makes it worse.

He looks at me, and I look at him, and that Weird Al song echoes in my head. I should have known better than to rewatch that on YoutTube. I should have remembered how often it was stuck in my head, like, a decade ago, when it came out.

Anyway. We blink at each other, absorbing each other, as I try to ignore the echoing song in my head and suppress my sudden urge to get up and do that only arrives when it would be most inconvenient for me to actually do anything at all. He’s older than me, but I am entirely incapable of determining by how much; he could be twenty two, or fourty eight, and would not be surprised either way. His hair was various shades of grey, his eyes a dark and dull blue, his face dotted in silver stubble. He wears a dark brown t-shirt and khaki shorts and boating shoes.

“Necro,” he says, a thing I have been called before, a thing that means little to me.  _ Dead _ , it means, in Latin, and he’s not far off. All I do is rot all day and night long. Each creative urge is a maggot that eats away at me just a little bit more.

But I know he means necro as in ‘necromancer’, as in a thing I know about from books and stuff, as in a psychic medium person when the writer wants to seem a little less silly than the words ‘psychic’ and ‘medium’ have come to feel. But, you know, the part of the word that denotes someone that does whatever magic it takes to speak to the dead is the ‘mancer’ part; necro just means dead; so when the writer types  _ necro _ it just really doesn’t make much sense. In speech, I guess, if it were real, necro would be a thing ‘cause it’s shorter but writers don’t really need to care. When you’re writing about people seeing dead people, suspension of disbelief extends far past colloquial slang.

That being said, words only mean stuff because we want them to and it’s really dumb and pretentious to linger on this, and I’m dumb and pretentious and an idiot, and writers can do whatever the h*ck they want, thank you very much-

“Hello?” The man is snapping at me, staring at me as if I’m an idiot, and he is right because I am. I blink at him again.

I need my Seroquel. “What?”

“Your name, dipshit.”

“Dipshit’s fine, I guess,”

He narrows his eyes at me, though not necessarily angrily, tilting his head to the side. It makes me uncomfortable; I do not like people; I do not like men; I do not like ghosts; I do not like to be seen; I want him to leave. “What?”

“It’s not inaccurate, I suppose,” I continue, laying back. I look up at the boring ceiling and the stationary bug guts. We sit in silence for a long time.

_ Don’t ignore the ghosts, _ I can hear my therapist’s familiar voice. I know they’re not ghosts; I know they’re not real; but that is what they call themselves, so that is what I call them, so that is what she calls them.  _ They’re there for a reason. Engage with them, find out what they want, what they mean. _

“What do you want?”

“I want my fucking body back,” he snaps, a sentiment many of them share. I think it ties into my weird proclivity for body horror, my dysphoria and dysmorphia and my eating disorder and my frustration at my twitching and involuntary movements. This is my flesh prison, that is their mist prison, and we cannot control or interact, we must only exist and accept.

My therapist seems to approve, but she doesn’t say that in so many words, she just purses her lips and closes her eyes and nods gently and does not go on to argue, but question.

“That sucks,” I said, wanting to move onto something new and interesting and enlightening. I like figuring things out with my therapist, because it’s fun and exciting and it makes me feel hope, something I was sorely missing for a very long time. Also, because it makes her happy, and I like the attention. But mostly the hope. “How’d you die?”

I’ve learned that they get angry when I don’t pretend they're real, so I roleplay with them, because otherwise it’s just really not productive, is it?

He’s silent for a long time, so I look over to see him making a sardonic face at the carpet. “You wanna know how I died,” he says in a dry voice. He looks and feels very dramatic; unfortunately for him, it is more than lost on me. “Ain’t that a bit rude, dipshit?”

“Probably,” I say nonchalantly.

He eyes me with a funny look, and then suddenly, he is entirely mutilated, his skin half burned off, his clothes bloodied and torn and scorched. His hair is nearly entirely gone; one half of him seems to have burned for a long time, while the other looks like it might have been scraped against a cheese grater. I will spare you, dear reader- or whatever, maybe this should be a film, but I don’t know how I would skip this? Audiobook? Fuck if I know- the goriest details, as long as you promise to know, with or without dwelling, that it is much, much worse than you are imagining. Unless you’re, like, an EMT or you work in an ER or something. Or you also see ghosts, I guess.

But, as usual, my response is not nearly as strong as I would have expected from myself. It does not really feel real to see that, and my brain does not process it, and after so much of the same I am not even phased by it. Not only is it not real, it would not feel real to me, anyway, someone who has trouble taking the feelings I feel and, you know, feeling them.

It’s very complicated.

I stare at him, his display causing me to blink twice, but I remain otherwise unphased. Through his mangled appearance, I cannot quite decipher his expression; he is shocked, and/or angry, by my response- or lack thereof.

Which, to be entirely fair, is entirely understandable.

“Car crash?”

He regresses to his original state, leaning back and eying me. “Motorcycle.”

“At least that’s a rad way to go,”

His expression changes into something dry and almost frightened. Maybe not frightened- haunted. I would imagine it is an unpleasant memory, to say the least.

I hope ghosts have therapists. Death seems traumatic, oftentimes. “Sorry,” I say.

He lets out a mirthless laugh, more of a croaking sound. He picks at a fuzz on his pants that does not seem to want to leave his person. Maybe he’s stuck with that for an eternity.

I would go insane. Moreso than I already am. I would find a way to kill myself again.

I hope death, in real life, is just sleep. I can’t take existence for eternity.

He eyes me after a while, his eyes dwelling on all of the parts I would rather a man not dwell on. I shudder and scowl at the wall.

I wonder what  _ that _ might say about my psyche, and decide not to pick that particular happenstance apart.

Happenstance. I think I’m using that a little incorrectly, but it's a fun word and it's close enough that you  _ know what I mean, goddamn it _ . I like fun words; I like it when other people use fun words; I read them and I like them and I steal them and I hope I get chances to use them and I hope other people like it when I use them.

“Nice art,” he says, and I look at him to see him eyeing Artemis and her handmaidens, who I had depicted lounging in a hot spring, which probably didn’t exist in Greece but whatever.

Artemis would turn him into a deer and have her hounds hunt and kill him for that, and she should.

“Artemis was a maiden Goddess,” I say. “One man tried to spy on her as she dressed, and she turned him into a deer and had her hounds hunt and kill him.”

The man looks amused, and it bothers me. “Sounds like my ex,” he says, and I send a silent prayer to Artemis herself that his ex be protected from creeps like him.

“You’re not human,” I say. “That’s how you know I’m a necromancer.”

“Take you that long to piece it together, dipshit?” He asks, leaning back.

“For sure,” I say.

He rolls his eyes and stares at the far corner of my room. “I’m a werewolf,” he says. I see a lot of werewolves, usually younger ones; children to people my age. A varied bunch, werewolves.

I like mythology and monsters and everything peculiar like that. My therapist says it plays a big part in my understanding of the world, of justice and of karma, and the purposes of what I see, what it means, what I’m dealing with.

Werewolves were poor and angry and othered. A lot of the werewolves I see are people of color, and/or queer, and/or some other kind of marginalized person, but they are always exclusively men, which is weird, because I think angry queer women are hot and would very much like them to step on me. They differ in their specifics, but I’d say they all fit my general idea of werewolf; angry and undervalued and if not justifiable, at least sympathetic, once you get to know them. I vibed with them a lot.

Vampires are rich and strange and out of touch, strangely appealing and violently disconcerting at the same time. Men, women, young, old- they had no proclivity. I didn’t like them very much. My therapist says its because vampires symbolize wealth and desire and lust and eternal life, all things that make me very, very, very uncomfortable.

I’ve also got this weird thing with blood… It’s not, like, a true phobia, but it does make me queasy, but only when it  _ gushes _ . I have an issue with self harm, and I have to make lots of shallow cuts to do it right, because the few times I’ve cut too deep and brought up too much blood, I’ve ended up fainting and it’s never been good.

Anyway.

Witches are harder to explain, but they, too, have a specific air about them in common; wistful, maybe, from being in touch with nature and magic and stuff. But, again, harder to verbalize.

Sirens, sort of a feminine counterpart to werewolves; also angry and othered, but in a much more inherently ‘womanly’ way, taking it out in a much more feminine way. My therapist says it ties into my sexual frustration, my loneliness, my internalized slut shaming tendencies, my fear and near obsession with myself being a tainted and unclean person worthy only of punishing other, worse people; sort of people who made me this way; men. The only thing sirens have in common are that they are unapologetically feminine, and they really, really hate if not all then the general concept of men, and, like, same.

There are others, of course, but those are the most common, so the ones I have a large enough sample size to be confident about my deductions.

I hear the deadbolt before I realize that the man has disappeared once again. It’s been a long, long time since any of the ghosts have ever stayed around other people; my mom had still been alive.

Mom. She’s a thought I often try to avoid, because it makes me sad, and she deserves more than my stupid, useless sorrow.

I wish she would appear, just once, just for a while.

Just as tears form in my eyes, my aunt knocks on my door and I jump. “Yeah?”

“Do you want me to put your chicken tenders in the fridge?”

I know I will not get up to get them. I know I will not eat if I do not eat them now. I stare at the clock, which reads a quarter til four, for a long moment. “No.”

She opens the door and I get up to grab the styrofoam box and retreat to my bed once more, knowing she is judging me, but I know she’s going to watch television and I hate television and I can still hear it in the dining room because she refuses to watch in her own bedroom even though she knows I hate it.

It’s her house and I live here for free and I am her mentally ill niece and maybe she should take that into consideration but also I need to calm down and all of these things are true and, as always, I remain neutral and also really upset about the situation as I open the takeout box and frown at the contents. The door closes.

I hate chicken. I hate meat. I hate food, and I do not want to eat it, or feel it's horrible, freakish textures, or taste it’s bizarre and unnatural flavors, or smell its vile scents. The inside of the lid is wet and the fries are moist, the definitely-too-tart ranch container is covered in water droplets, and steam rushes to my boring, plan, bug-speckled ceiling, which is an appetizing thought, thank you very much.

I gingerly scrape the thin breading off of it ‘chicken breast’ and shudder with each bite. I manage to eat a dozen fries and one and a half tenders before stopping and sitting as still as humanly possible, trying to make sure that I was not going to throw it all back up. Once I was relatively confident that it was safe, I leaned over to grab my Maalox from the nightstand/shelf/lamp hybrid beside me, downing at least two doses, before chugging half of a water bottle and adding it to the other four half-empty bottles I refuse to drink from because They Are Old and I am a glorified child.

My mom used to say I looked like Abigail Breslin. The resemblance has only faded as time has gone by.

I realize that there is at least a thirty five percent chance that my aversion to water bottles that I have not opened that same day may very well originate from Mom’s comparison of us and me wanting to be like her so my mom would say more and make me feel special in the process.

I stand up and carry my leftovers to the fridge. In the morning I will gingerly eat the cold breading before promptly vomiting, then cry in the shower before eating, with much disdain, a single half slice of rye toast. Now, though, I walk into my aunt’s bathroom and lock the door, something that bothers her because I also do that to hurt myself, though never in  _ her _ bathroom because that would be both inconsiderate and very, very dumb. I keep the lights off to strip and stare at myself in the mirror while the water grows hot.

I am short and thin and gangly and freakish, and I’m quite fond of that, actually. I like the emaciated look, which is something I would never admit to anyone, even my therapist who knows nearly everything about me. I am birdlike and very inhuman, if not entirely unhealthy anymore. I touch my abdomen, only the faintest hint of my ribcage visible, and remember what I looked like before I got a little better. I stare unblinkingly at my reflection in the dark until my demented mind twists my reflection into something monstrous and unholy, and I keep staring until my eyes ache and I’m a little afraid. Then I blink hard several times, my eyes weeping in protest as I turn the light on and step into the worryingly hot water of the shower. It stings my feet. My  _ breasts _ are small and there is a small pocket of fat on my mons pubis and I can see them both when I look straight down. My  _ hips are wide _ but there is little fat on them. If I weighed more, I would likely have  _ a very nice, pear-like figure _ , just like my  _ mom _ and my  _ aunt _ , and I am glad that I don’t. I run my hands over my hip bones, the last remaining remnant of my truly disfigured shape, and I slap them very hard, and it hurts. I stand beneath the hot water until it isn’t hot anymore, then proceed to absent-mindedly clean myself.

I close my eyes and pretend I’m not dysphoric or dysmorphic while being very much both of those things, and when I am done I leave the shower and clean myself and shuffle my feet back to my bedroom and lay down on my bed again.

I will sleep, and I will rise, and I will work, and I will return home to an empty house. I will eat and vomit and cry and eat again before drinking my Maalox as if it were water.

Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

I will rot.


End file.
